Lovely Image Eldar, we tried to shoot some of these on the Svalbard trip, they were a lot darker than this Guy so I guess it was a different variant. You seem to have a few of these endangered animals where you are located, such a wonderful experience when your able to Photograph something like this, or the Lynx.

We ran into a few people from Norway up in Svalbard (as it's part of Norway not unexpected), I was surprised that the Norwegians are such very keen hunters, it wasn't something I had ever considered when thinking about Norway, but it is surely one of the most Beautiful places I've seen, I hope to see more of the Country at some point.

The easiest way to see this animal is to go to the breeding station at Dovre. When they are released to the wild it seems they still like to come back, at least for some time. This one was shot close by. I believe there are less than 200 wild animals left, so to go and look for them elsewhere is not exactly easy. The ones you find on Spitsbergen/Svalbard are of the same species, called white fox. They change color summer and winter. There is another sub species called blue fox, which you can find on Greenland, Iceland and Jan Mayen (and round the neck of a certain type of women).

The hunting tradition has very deep roots in Norway. Back in the days of the civilized, polite and diplomatic Vikings (!), we were rich conquerors. But from the big plague, The Black Death, in the 14th century, which wiped out about 60% of our population, up until we found oil a few decades ago, we very poor and the only way people could survive was to harvest nature as efficient as they could. And it was not until fairly recently we got effective protective measures to secure the population of wolf, bear, lynx, wolverine etc. The arctic fox has actually been protected since the 1930ties, but its problem is not only humans. The red fox is bigger and displaces the smaller arctic fox and the availability of prey in the high mountain areas can be scares. I hope the breeding station continues their success, so more people can see these charming little animals in the wild.

First post to forums.Picture taken last fall. Fox was really curious and followed me around about an hour.Got few pictures of him and this was the best of all of them. Rest of the pictures he had a weird pose or I missed focus.Will update camera settings later when back at computer.